Within the past two decades, a recurring narrative structure has appeared in a spate of postcolonial, post-conflict novels that explore the role of memory in transnational human rights/humanitarian work. These novels, which often take place in a country recovering from civil war, consistently bring together a trio of figures that one can also find in many real-world aid projects: a well-meaning, metropolitan outsider seeking to uncover buried traumatic narratives and promote healing; a native who either offers the outsider crucial indigenous knowledge or simply becomes the outsider's target for salvation; and a bicultural mediator who enables the outsider's access to both the place and its people. Why does this narrative structure play out in a consistent manner across an array of global Anglophone texts? What might its recurrence suggest about the "postcolonial novel" of the early twenty-first century? This essay argues that these texts represent a sub-genre of the postcolonial novel of human rights. It compares two such novels: Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love (2010) and Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000), set in post-conflict Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, respectively.
Through the trio structure, these novels ask us to conceive of metropolitan characters who travel to war-torn, developing countries to promote healing or seek justice as types rather than as individuals and, in so doing, critique the traditional focus of human rights discourse on individual-to-individual aid. The trio structures of Forna's and Ondaatje's novels prompt metropolitan readers to see Adrian and Anil (the figures with whom those readers are most likely to identify because of formal cues in the novels themselves) as a "type" of international human rights/humanitarian worker entangled in the very conflicts for which they seek justice. By reframing Adrian and Anil as types, The Memory of Love and Anil's Ghost ask readers to think about these metropolitan outsiders as what Michael Rothberg has called "implicated subjects": figures who "contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes" (The Implicated Subject, 1). Put differently, I argue that these novels not only cohere around a set of generic conventions but also that they dramatize the process of metropolitan characters recognizing their participation in a genre of human rights work. Recognizing the harmful patterns (both cultural and economic) that structure humanitarian work is a key first step to replacing these narratives with more ethical, productive ones.
